The Good, the Bad and the Great about Microsoft Professional Support

This week, I went more than 24 hours without sleep trying to resolve an Exchange 2000 issue for a church in Garland, First it was a queuing problem, then it turned into an entire network infrastructure fiasco and ended up with a problem application that was crashing the SMTP virtual server. So in the spirit of 'Git er Dun', I ponied up the $245 for some professional help from Microsoft.

THE GOOD - Right out of the gate, my support guy took the problem and was able to gain full control of the server using LiveMeeting over a remote connection from my house (Garland is an hour drive with no traffic). He was checking the settings, making changes and I was getting a distilled shot of Exchange training as I watched. Then my guru showed me how the network was configured kinda screwy (technical term) and that I had to make a trip to the church to manually plug and unplug cables. No problem, happy to do it :)

THE BAD - When I arrived on-site, I couldn't reach my support guy, because he was with another customer and after repeated failed promises of callbacks from his superior, I finally got a hold of somebody to help. The only problem was, this new person didn't really want to help. And so, through the night, I took carefully reconfigured the network the way I thought it should be all the while trying to find someone in Bill Gates' Compound to give me some the guidance I paid hansdomely for. The kicker about this part of the story is that I assigned the case a severity of CRITICAL and was told by Microsoft to be available "24 hours a day, round-the-clock until the issue is resolved". Well, I did my part and was frustrated why they weren't keeping up their end of the deal.

THE GREAT - Morning again and I finally got my Brainiac Buddy back. Within 3 hours we had the whole email server in ship-shape condition and he even helped me properly accomplish the initial task that caused this mess in the first place. Here's the best part. After he asked me if there was anything else to be done, he mentioned that the notes in my case were littered with failed attempts to reach anyone competent the previous night. He apologized and then said he was going to refund my money. Now that's going the extra mile.